


Infinite DC Journeys: Monochrome

by LivingStoneWriter



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who (Comics), Doctor Who - Various Authors, Twilight Zone
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Alien Time Lords (Doctor Who), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Time Lords & Ladies, Classic Doctor Who References, Classic Who Companions Are Awesome, Doctor Who References, Drama, Fantasy, First Doctor Era, Gen, Horror, Inspired by The Twilight Zone, Multiverse, Mystery, Mystery Stories, Parallel Universes, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Suspense, Team TARDIS, Thriller, Twilight Zone References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:00:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29294046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LivingStoneWriter/pseuds/LivingStoneWriter
Summary: Long before her sixth regeneration, Candace (the original incarnation of Neas) had once taken an earlier trip into the macabre universe known as "The Twilight Zone." Along with her companion/adopted son, Alan Harris, they arrive in the desolate, isolated town of Peaksville, Ohio. If the name of this town sounds familiar, that's because it is the home of "The Monster," Anthony Fremont. Thankfully, Candace and Alan won't be dealing with the wrath of Anthony alone. In this journey of theirs, they also encounter the original incarnation of Candace's friend and mentor, The Doctor, and his companions (Ian, Barbara, and Susan). But are the six of them capable of handling the godlike mental powers of a six-year-old?
Relationships: Companion(s) & Time Lord(s) (Doctor Who), First Doctor & Barbara Wright, First Doctor & Original Character(s), First Doctor & Susan Foreman, First Doctor/Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton & Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton & First Doctor, Ian Chesterton & First Doctor & Susan Foreman & Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton/Barbara Wright, Susan Foreman/Barbara Wright, The Doctor & Original Time Lord Character(s), The Doctor & Susan Foreman, The Doctor & Time Lord(s), Time Lord(s) & TARDIS(es)
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

****

**Part One**

Alan never knew a gym existed in Candace’s Type-Z TARDIS. There were a lot of places in it he hadn’t explored yet – some of which Candace often talked about and Alan sometimes doubted she’d ever been to. According to her, she was inspired to install a gym in an area she called the “Zero Room” (a tranquil space reserved for Time Lords who need relief from stress or anxiety).

But Candace had made it into the opposite. Now she used it as a place to exert all the energy she constantly built up in her Time Lord physique. For a woman who physically looked fifty years of age, she had the body of a thirtysomething. It was virtually superhuman.

That was clear when Alan spotted her during a round of bench-presses.

She requested him to load on a nerve-wracking four hundred and fifty pounds, which she handled as if it were half as much.

“What’s it like?” Alan brought himself to ask.

“What’s what like, honey?” Candace returned in-between breaths.

“What’s it like being a Time Lord?”

“Well, for starters, I wasn’t always one. I was once just a normal kid like you, albeit one-half human and the other half Gallifreyan. It wasn’t ‘til I was about your age when I had the Gallifreyan half of my genes enhanced by a guy named Rassilon. Ever since, I’ve felt more and more powerful…like a superhero brought to life.”

“Sounds pretty legit.”

Candace racked the four-hundred-pound bar without need of Alan’s assistance. “I’ll admit it _has_ been cool. But I _am_ a little worried about my future in it… specifically the whole ‘regeneration’ thing.”

“Regeneration? What does that mean?”

“Something the Doctor said would happen to me one day. He calls it ‘cheating death’ but didn’t specify the whole process. He only said that I won’t be me anymore…that I’ll be someone else.”

Alan noticed how much the topic unsettled her, so he decided not to press her on about it. Instead, they finished their workout and showered, making their way thereafter back to the control room. Candace had the controls on autopilot as they traversed the infinite dimensional corridor. She successfully dematerialized them out.

From the viewscreen, they saw that they arrived in a withered cornfield.

“We’re back on Earth?” Alan observed.

“One of them perhaps,” Candace elucidated. She walked out into the field with Alan, a wave of nostalgia overwhelming her. “I used to run through a field like this when I was a little girl, back on my family’s Atlanta farm.”

“You think that might be where we’ve landed?” Alan asked.

Candace took a deep breath, her bosom expanding. A button from her tight white blouse popped, holding on for as long as it could have. It was now down to one. Another deep breath and Candace would be showing more of that thirtysomething body than she cared to.

Alan couldn’t guess why she did it until she told him, “Nope. Not the farm. Smells too desolate to be Atlanta, Georgia.”

“You can tell where we are by smellin’ the air?!” An impressed Alan exclaimed.

Candace smiled at him, tapping her nose. “Senses _also_ got enhanced.”

As they walked further through the cornfield, they were stopped dead in their tracks once they crossed paths with another group of people: two gentlemen (an elderly one and a much younger one) and two women (a teenaged girl and a woman who looked to be the same age as the younger man). In front of them sat a large jack-in-the-box.

“Undoubtedly, a jack-in-the-box is what it appears to be, Chesterton,” the elderly man told the young one, speaking with a discernable English accent. “Look at the design.”

“But _how_ could a jack-in-the-box have gotten all the way out here, Grandfather?” the teenaged girl queried, also speaking with an English accent.

Alan moved his left foot forward and stepped on a twig. It snapped loudly enough to inadvertently draw the group of British individuals’ attention towards him and Candace. “And who might you two be?” the elder gentleman asked.

“We might ask _you_ the same question,” Candace countered.

“But I asked _first_ ,” the elder argued.

“Don’t mind him,” the young gentleman spoke up. “We’re just passing through. My name’s Ian.” He gestured to their female associates. “This is Barbara and Susan. And the old grouch here is…”

“I’m the Doctor,” the elder defiantly intervened in his introduction whilst clasping at the lapels of his coat.

Candace froze with astonishment upon learning of the elder’s name.

“You’re… _The_ Doctor?!” she reacted.

“Yes, I am.” The old man scowled at her. “Have you heard of me?”

Candace swallowed hard. “Y-You’re something of a legend where I’m from.”

“Oh? And where might that be?”

“Galli—” Candace briskly caught herself, nearly on the verge of revealing vital information to a man who (from his perspective) had never seen her before. He was one of the Doctor’s earliest incarnations. Which one exactly, she could not be certain of. She _was_ certain of one thing: he couldn’t find out any more about her.

“Speak up, woman,” the Doctor urged. “Where _are_ you from? Hmm?”

Candace shook her head. “It’s not important.” She used the oversized jack-in-the-box as a way of diverging from the topic. “What _is_ important is what _this_ thing is.”

The Doctor fell for the diversion, bringing his focus back on the box.

“Yes, my companions and I were just discussing its place of origin,” he stated. “We found it just sitting here in the middle of the field.”

“It could be as simple as a child leaving it behind,” Barbara presumed.

“Impossible,” the Doctor refuted. “Look at its size and density. Only a man could’ve brought it this far out in the field for the child to play.”

“Doctor, could it be that you’re making this issue more complicated than it has to be?” Ian politely disputed with a smirk.

While the adults debated among themselves, Susan got the yearning to turn the crank on the size of the box. She did so, much to the displeasure of her grandfather. The melody of “Pop Goes the Weasel” played to the speed of which she cranked. “It _does_ work like an ordinary jack-in-the-box, Grandfather,” she said. “I don’t see any reason there was to—AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”

Susan and everyone else received a huge shock – and it wasn’t the fun one related to most jack-in-the-boxes.

It wasn’t the plastic head of a toy clown on a spring that popped out.

It was the decapitated head of a human male.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part Two**

“Holy $#%*!”

It had been a long time since Alan swore like that. He never used such language – not around Candace, at least – until the day she spewed out a few expletives in front of him, after dropping a wrench on her foot. Since that day, he made a promise to her that he would never swear himself. Unfortunately, he broke that promise the second he witnessed a man’s decapitated head spring out of the oversized jack-in-the-box.

“Sorry about that,” he apologized to Candace.

Instead of getting angry, she let out a little snicker of amusement. “It’s O.K., sweetheart. You actually took the words right out of my mouth.”

Barbara calmed the mortified Susan, who regretted her decision to crank open the box. Meanwhile, Ian and the Doctor worked together in closing the unsettling box, which might as well have been the casket for what was left of an innocent man.

“What kind of sicko would do that to a dude?” Alan questioned.

“I can think of a _hundred_ sickos,” Candace replied. “I just hope none of them are in _this_ dimension!”

“What was that you said?” The Doctor snapped in attention towards her. “What do you mean by ‘dimension’? Hmm?”

Candace slightly bit her lower lip, unnerved from her error in diction.

“Slip of the tongue,” she covered. “I meant to say ‘this _area_ ’.”

The Doctor wasn’t entirely convinced. Not that it would have matter any longer, once Ian approached him and informed, “There’s a farmhouse not far from here.”

“Ah, excellent!” The Doctor optimistically exclaimed. “Perhaps the people there can supply some answers of the strangeness we’ve encountered out in this cornfield.” He briefly turned to Candace and Alan. “Come along, you two.”

Candace hadn’t anticipated the invitation, but she accepted nonetheless.

As she and Alan trailed a distance behind the Doctor and his companions, Alan couldn’t help but notice how nervous Candace looked. “Are you good right now?”

“Of course,” Candace was quick to respond. “Why you ask?”

“No reason,” he fibbed, not wanting to embarrass her. “Don’t you know a dude who calls himself ‘Doctor’?”

Candace nodded. “I do.”

“And that’s him and his crew right there?”

Again, Candace nodded. “That’s right.”

“Aw, tight! All the times you bragged about him, I finally get to meet him! But why doesn’t he recognize you?”

“Because this is a much earlier version of him – one that hasn’t met me yet.”

“For real? But won’t that, like, mess up the time-space continuum or something? I mean, is it like _Back to the Future_ and you could cease to exist or something like that?”

“I’m not sure, sweetheart. But, for both of our sakes, don’t mention anything about me to him. As far as he and his friends are concerned, we’re total strangers they met out in an even _stranger_ cornfield.”

A minute later, they arrived at the farmhouse Ian sighted.

There, they were greeted by the farmer, who was tending to his lawn upon their arrival. “Well, hello there, strangers,” he said, sounding almost overjoyed by their visitation. “Haven’t seen you all around these parts. We don’t get very many visitors in Peaksville these days.”

“Peaksville?” Barbara frowned at the name. “I know of many areas in America, but Peaksville isn’t one of them.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” the farmer said. “We’re sort of…closed off from the rest of the world.” The manner of his tone was more in fear than jest. “Name’s John Fremont, by the way.”

“Pleasure to meet you, John.” Ian shook his hand. “I’m Ian Chesterton, and this is Barbara Wright, Susan, Candace, Alan, and the Doctor.”

“A doctor, eh?” an amused John remarked.

“Yes, my boy,” the Doctor said. “Before we proceed any further with the formalities, I must inform you that my associates and I have come across a disturbing sight out there in that cornfield: what remains of a man’s head inside of a jack-in-the-box. Now I must ask you _who_ on earth would have the means and disconcerting creativity to do that to a man, hmm?”

John began to sweat profusely; either from the heat or, more presumably, his nerves. His anxiety became more evident when a little boy in overalls emerged out of the farmhouse.

“Oh,” John said in an unnerved gasp. “Hello, Anthony. How are you, son?”

Anthony didn’t say a word. He merely looked on the six strangers, standing in front of his father.

“Is this your son?” Candace asked John.

“He is. A-And he’s a _very_ good boy. A _very_ good boy.” There was much exuberance in his voice, clearly forced and in no way genuine. He turned back to Anthony and continued in the same voice, “These are new friends of ours, son. Some of them have come from a long way to Peaksville.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Anthony impassively said.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, John faced the visitors one last time. “Well, it was nice meeting you folks. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Let them stay,” Anthony spoke up.

This visibly worried John, but he managed to maintain a pleasant façade. “Why, Anthony…that _very_ good of you to offer them to stay. But, uh, six strangers are a lot of people to have around in our little home. Too many mouths to feed for the night, wouldn’t ya say?”

In response to this, Anthony turned and faced the Fremont farmhouse, which did appear as small and simple as John made it out to be. However, right at the moment Anthony pointed a finger towards the farmhouse, it suddenly transformed into a large, luxurious mansion.

“Good heavens,” the Doctor yelped, witnessing the supernatural spectacle along with the other adults, who were just as overawed as he was.

A middle-aged woman in a flower dress and apron rushed out of the newly-erected mansion, crying out John’s name in terror. He went right to her, holding her in his arms to calm her.

“It’s alright, Cloris,” John told her (and, to a certain extent, himself as well). “Anthony gave us a new home…and it’s a _very_ good home. It was a very _good_ thing for Anthony to do.”

Cloris cried into John’s shoulder – they just weren’t tears of joy.  
  


* * *

  
“That is _not_ a normal child,” the Doctor stated, just as soon as he and his associates were in their own privacy within the Fremonts’ new study room.

“Understatement of the century, bro,” Alan wittingly told the Doctor.

“His parents are absolutely terrified of him,” Barbara noted.

“And _that_ could be a sign of how powerful is,” Candace said. “He could be capable of doing more than shapeshifting a house.”

“Get away.”

Their heads turned in the direction that the shriveled, monotone voice spoke from, finding a woman standing at the doorway. They knew her name to be Amy, having been introduced as Anthony’s aunt earlier when the visitors stepped into the mansion. She seemed like a guileless woman at first glance, barely uttering a word. This was the first instance that she spoke since they walked inside.

“What did you say, madam?” the Doctor beseeched.

“Get as far away as you can,” Aunt Amy resaid, “while you still value your lives.”

And she spoke no further than that, leaving the study as swiftly as she came.

“I think we should do what she says,” Alan suggested.

“No!” The Doctor boldly refused. “These people are being controlled by a six-year-old with the imagination of a monster, therefore making _him_ one. We must stop this child at whatever the cost!”

Ian didn’t like what the Doctor was implying. “You’re not suggesting that we _murder_ that boy, are you?”

“At whatever the cost!” The Doctor repeated with more vigor.

Candace could hardly believe her own ears. Here was a man that, from the time in which she knew him, was incapable of resorting to such a disquieting solution – especially not with children like Anthony. The Doctor, in his original body, was quite the hardhearted (and hardheaded) alien.

“You can’t be serious, Doctor,” Barbara expressed her disdain of the Doctor’s cold resolve. “He’s only a little boy who’s possibly more frightened of his power than anyone else.”

“Barbara’s right,” Candace said, only realizing the inadvertent play on the English schoolteacher’s name after the fact. “There has to be a better approach to this.”

“It would be a useless method, I’m sure,” the Doctor immediately disproved.

“And yours is tactless!” Barbara scolded him.

“Uh, ya’ll?” Alan tensely muttered. “We got company.”

They followed his gaze, which was directed back towards the doorway. Except it wasn’t Aunt Amy standing there this time. As the group had been discussing what to do with Anthony, the boy himself stood at the doorway with a look of judgmental anger on his face.


	3. Chapter 3

**Part Three**

“You’re bad people! You’re _very_ bad people! And you’re thinking bad thoughts about me!” The angered Anthony raged, pointing his finger at Candace, the Doctor, and their companions.

“You are an _evil_ child,” the Doctor accused. “And you _must_ be stopped!”

“Doctor,” Candace immediately stepped in. “You’re _not_ helping our case!” She then turned her attention to Anthony and calmly said, “We’re not bad people, Anthony. We’re only trying to…”

“You’re lying!” Anthony snapped. “You’re a bad woman, and you must be sent away from here!”

His finger fixated specifically on Candace.

Before she knew it, she was no longer in the bedroom with Anthony, the Doctor, or the others. She found herself standing in a field of fog with the stars shimmering over her while random objects – an eye, a door, a doll, and a window that shattered repeatedly – floated all around.

From the looks of it, Anthony had sent her into another dimensional plane.

Candace wasn’t there alone for much longer. Soon, the Doctor and their friends popped up, all of them baffled and aghast over their current surroundings.

“Where are we?” Barbara asked. “Where has he put us?!”

“My guess: away from reality and into someplace in-between,” Candace deduced.

“Good guess.” A voice outside their party spoke close nearby. They spotted a man in a black suit and tie, standing coolly amid the fog.

“Who are you?” Alan asked him.

“A guide,” the man said. “But you can call me ‘Rod’.”

“Alright, _Rod_ ,” Ian remarked. “Is there any way out of this place?”

“The key is your imagination,” Rod answered, shortly before an endless office corridor assembled itself around the group. Several white doors were on both sides of the hallway, providing them with unlimited choices. “Through one of these doors, you will find your way back to Anthony Fremont’s world. The other doors will lead you to others within the fifth dimension.”

“You are mistaken, my boy,” the Doctor called him out. “There are only _four_ dimensions. The fourth itself being time.”

“There _is_ a fifth one, and you’re standing right in it,” Rod said. “An entirely new dimension, one that exists beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

The fog around Rod became denser, shrouding his form from the outsiders.

When it cleared, Rod had vanished.

“What that dude said just now sounds _very_ familiar,” Alan pointed out.

“He also said that one of these doors will lead us back to Anthony,” Ian added.

“But there are _hundreds_ of doors, Ian,” Barbara indicated. “Any one of them could be where we started.”

“Then we’ll just have to split up,” the Doctor suggested. “Candace and I will take one door, Ian and Barbara will take another, and Susan and Alan will _also_ take another.” He then removed a couple of items from his coat that he handed to Ian and Alan. “Here, take these spare TARDIS keys, should either of you find it before we do.”

And so, the six travelers divided into their teams.

Candace and the Doctor entered through one door and stepped into a post-apocalyptic setting. A realm of Earth desolated by a nuclear blast of some kind, powerful enough to wipe out all life.

Except for one man. A mustached man of small stature, wandering blindly amid the ruins. “Sir, are you alright?” Candace asked him.

The man froze just as he heard her voice. “I-Is someone there?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Are you harmed, my boy?”

“No,” the man acknowledged. “But I…I thought…I thought I was alone.” He took a step towards Candace and the Doctor, stumbling over a small pile of bricks. Thankfully, Candace caught him in time.

“You’re blind,” she noticed.

“Without my glasses, I am,” the man told her. “They broke when I bent to pick up one of the books I found in the public library. A library. Can you believe it? Still standing among all this devastation. You see, I _love_ to read books. It’s a favorite pastime of mine. I would’ve read for ages with the insurmountable amount of books I found in that library. But now…without my glasses…”

The man burst into tears.

Candace’s hearts sank for him. “You poor thing,” she pitied the man. Unwilling to let him wander what was left of his Earth any further, she constructed a new pair of glasses for him to see by using the bottoms of two crystal-clear glass bottles and wires for the frames.

The first thing that the man saw was Candace’s bosom, partially exposed beneath the tight white blouse barely held together by the single button. He looked right up to the statuesque blonde’s smiling face, able to make out the few wrinkles it had. “I can see again,” he cheered. “Oh, thank you, ma’am! Thank you!”

“You’ve very welcome, Mister…?”

“Bemis. Henry Bemis.”

Mister Bemis jubilantly departed with his new glasses, now capable of watching out for the fallen debris at his feet.

“Why did you help that man, hmm?” the Doctor asked Candace. “He had no relevance to our mission.”

Candace, still dumbfounded by how different this Doctor was apart from his future successors, told the old man, “Every life matters, no matter if it’s relative or not.”  
  


* * *

  
The door Ian and Barbara walked through led them into a normal office setting, complete with a bookshelf and a desk with a couple of chairs situated in front of it. There was also a window with a view of a city that neither of them was able to identify. One thing was for sure: it wasn’t Peaksville.

“Another dead end,” Ian stated. “Wonder if we should mark an ‘X’ on that door, so that we don’t make the same mistake.”

“Ian, look at this.”

Barbara picked up a large book from the desk and showed its cover to Ian. The only detail on there was a title that read, “To Serve Man.”

“Quite an ambiguous title,” Ian signified.

“It certainly is,” Barbara concurred. “Sounds like a cookbook.”

Suddenly, they heard the knob to the office door turning, which signaled them to hide. They did so, with Barbara hiding behind the bookshelf and Ian beneath the desk. From her hiding place, Barbara received an eyeful of the person entering the office. To her shock, it was a nine-foot-tall alien humanoid, one with a bulbous cranium, wearing a long white robe.

As much as she physically wanted to, Barbara refrained from screaming. She merely watched the tall alien being walk in, take the “To Serve Man” book from the desk, and walk back out. She went to Ian just as soon as he was out of his hiding place, hysterically clinging to him.

“Barbara, what’s the matter?” he asked. “Who was it? What did you see?”

“Oh, Ian,” Barbara wept. “Let’s just get out of here. And _please_ make sure to mark an ‘X’ on the door to this world.”  
  


* * *

  
The second her grandfather insisted on teaming her up with Alan, Susan could not have been more ecstatic. A tall, dark handsome young man with perfect muscle definition, Susan fell in love with him the moment she met him in that cornfield. He was brave as well, not even once fazed by the things they had seen that frightened Susan to her core.

Even as they went through one of the strange doors, Alan kept his cool.

They emerged out of the lavatory of a commercial airline currently in flight. A stewardess caught their entrance (or exit?) and said, “Please return to your seats. We’re experiencing heavy turbulence at the moment, and the pilot just turned on the ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ sign.”

Despite not being passengers of the flight, Alan and Susan did as she requested, finding two available seats. Susan sat close to the window, looking out of it to see the horrible thunderstorm they were flying in. “Not the ideal kind of weather to be traveling in, don’t you think, Alan?”

He responded with loud snoring, having apparently fallen asleep in his seat.

Susan couldn’t blame him for taking a moment to relax from all the stress of the adventure. She let him be, returning her focus to the thunderstorm outside. She had a fantastic view of the left wing of the plane, soaking in the heavy rain. Between the flashes of thunder, she swore to have seen something moving in the darkness.

She pressed her face close against the window to get a better look.

There _was_ something there…right on the wing of the plane.

Another flash of thunder revealed it to be a bear-like creature, tinkering with the wiring under one of the engine cowlings that could cause the aircraft to crash.


	4. Chapter 4

**Part Four**

Alan had only rested his eyes for a few minutes, nearly drifting off to sleep, before Susan emitted an ear-splitting scream that woke up him and probably anyone else onboard that plane. He didn’t have a chance to ask her what was wrong when she grabbed his hand and yanked him out of his seat, leading him out the same way they came in – through the lavatory door.

They made it back into the endless office corridor, reuniting with Candace, the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara.

“Oh, Grandfather, it was horrible!” Susan clung to the Doctor.

“What happened in there?” Ian asked Alan, gesturing to the door he and Susan just stepped out of.

Alan shrugged. “Ya got me. One second, we were chill. And then the next…”

“I think we’ve seen enough terrifying things through these doors,” Barbara declared. “Is there _any_ way out of this place?”

“That man – Rod,” Candace said. “He gave us the answer.”

“He did?” the flabbergasted Alan uttered. “All I heard was a bunch of crazy from that dude.”

“But he _did_ give us the answer,” Candace reiterated. “The key is our imagination.”

“Our imagination?” Barbara grimaced.

“Think about it,” Candace suggested. “Rod said how this place lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. And what’s the one thing that connects those two together?”

“Imagination,” the Doctor answered. “Yes, yes! Brilliant deduction, my dear!”

Alan scratched his head. “I still don’t get it. We’re just gonna _imagine_ our way outta here?”

“That’s _exactly_ what we’re gonna do, hon,” Candace told him.

After giving him a kiss on his forehead, she proceeded to face one of the white doors. Prior to opening it, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, imagining what she wanted to see on the other side: her destination.

A white light flooded the corridor on their way through the opened door.

Once it dispersed, the travelers discovered themselves back in the study room of the Fremonts’ luxurious mansion. There was commotion in the adjacent room, which they knew to be the living room, as if a television program was on. They figured the Fremonts were gathered there.

“What’s the plan?” Alan asked. “How do we handle that lil’ dude this time?”

“Leave it to me,” Candace said. “I know what needs to be done.”

Alan detected a somberness to her tone that insinuated something severe. Even Barbara sensed it, and it made her uneasy most out of them all. Could Candace have finally reached a boiling point after being sent to that dimensional plane?

Straightening herself, she added a few more inches to her towering height as she pried open the sliding mahogany doors that separated the study and living rooms. Sure enough, the Fremonts were gathered around a big, fancy television set; but they weren’t the only ones there. The entire town had been summoned – presumably at Anthony’s command – for the viewing party.

It was obvious that no one wanted to be there.

Every single adult in the room had their eyes mindlessly on the tube, appearing as if they were lobotomized (and perhaps Anthony resorted to such measures to keep them complacent).

He sensed the presence of Candace, the Doctor, and their companions straightaway. Stepping away from the TV, he glared right at Candace. “You escaped,” he hissed. “That don’t matter! I’m gonna do something _worse_ to you, ‘cause you’re bad people, and you deserve to have something bad happen to you!”

“Now, see here, child! You have no—!”

Candace held up her left hand to silence the Doctor’s reproach. “You’re right, Anthony…we _are_ bad people,” she said, much to the disbelief of her fellow travelers. “And you have every right to inflict whatever punishment you see fit on us.”

The Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Susan, and Alan could not fathom whatever risky idea Candace conjured up with. She had willingly placed them once again at the mercy of a disturbed six-year-old boy with unimaginable power. There was no way Anthony would refuse an opportunity to deliver an even harsher price for their insolence.

And yet, there they stood, still breathing.

Anthony hadn’t budged an inch since Candace’s acceptance. “You’re not gonna fight back?” he questioned, sounding just as bewildered as the Doctor and the others.

“Why would we?” Candace returned.

“Because everyone always wants to,” Anthony responded. “I can hear it in their thoughts. They want to destroy me. So I send them someplace where they can’t hurt me.”

“They’re just scared, honey. You’re a special lil’ guy. You’ve just never been given _real_ love, because so many people live in fear of what you can do.”

“But isn’t that a _good_ thing?”

Candace shook her head. “No, sweetie. It’s not. You deserve _so_ much better.” She then offered her hand out to him. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

Anthony hesitated to accept her offer.

Then he looked at her face – that warm, loving smile on her beautifully aged face. He had never seen anyone smile that way at him before – not even from his own mother. There was no denying this woman, as threatening as she first appeared to Anthony with her mountainous stature and imposing build, had only the friendliest of intentions for him.

He accepted her hand and, in conjunction, her offer to step out of the mansion with her and her friends. Together, they headed back out across the cornfield until they reached the TARDIS… _Candace’s_ TARDIS.

“Good heavens,” the Doctor exclaimed in his surprise. “This was never here before! Where did it come from? What is it?”

“It’s my TARDIS, Doctor,” Candace slyly replied.

He looked on her with newfound interest. “Y-Your what?! Then that means you’re a…a…a…”

“A Time Lord,” Susan finished his thoughts, sharing in her grandfather’s wonder. With this revelation, she turned her attention on Alan and asked him, “And you’re one, too?”

Alan regretfully shook his head. “No. I’m sorry.”

Susan wasn’t all that disappointed. “It’s still nice that your mother _is_ one.”

Candace led Anthony and everyone else inside the tall, black rectangular solid that was her Gallifreyan module. Anthony was immediately overwhelmed – first by the much larger interior and afterwards by all the alien tech around.

“Are you…special…like me?” Anthony asked Candace.

“Not like you, Anthony,” she said. “And, if you come with me and Alan, we’ll find a world – a _good_ world – somewhere out there where you’ll be safe with people who’ll love and care for you. Until then, Alan and I will give you that world.”

“ _We_ will?” Alan cautiously queried, until Candace shot him with a stern glance that made him quickly change his attitude. “We _will_.”

Anthony was touched from Candace’s once-in-a-lifetime proposal.

But none was more-so moved than the Doctor himself. He expressed this admiration just as soon as he had a moment alone with Candace outside her TARDIS. “Quite the peaceful resolution to this incommodious state of affairs, my dear,” he said. “Perhaps I could learn to adopt such an approach in my lifetime.”

Candace smirked. “You will.”

“There _are_ many questions I have about your Time Lord history, of course.”

“Doctor, I reassure you, we’ll be more acquainted…in due time.”


End file.
